Category Archives: tech tips

Block eBay buyers in countries you don’t ship to, or with 0 feedback

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eBay recently streamlined their selling process but they sacrificed  some important features. Specifically, listing items is accomplished with a simpler interface than before and the buyer requirements seems to be missing in action on the new listing form. This is a real bummer as a listing can be ruined when a bum buyer beats out legitimate users 🙁 Thankfully, you can regain your eBay buyer requirements by adjusting your eBay preferences. This means you can set some important requirements like: Block buyers

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Reverse order of individual items in a delimited string

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Topic: Reversing the order of individual items in a string. Specifics: I had a date contained in a GET query string that was formatted as follows: 01/27/2013 and I needed it reversed to 2013/01/27 Here is a simple method to do the reversing in PHP: $toDate = htmlentities($_GET[‘to’]); $toDateNew = implode(“/”,(array_reverse(explode(“/”,$toDate)))); Explanation of code: First you explode the $toDate variable, then reverse the resulting array, finally you implode that array back into a string. Of course there are other date

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Set your own date format in MySQL

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Use DATE_FORMAT in MySQL to create your date strings formatted however you like: SELECT CONCAT(YEAR(res_hotel_booking_bookings.created),’-‘,DATE_FORMAT(res_hotel_booking_bookings.created,’%m’) ,’-‘,DATE_FORMAT(res_hotel_booking_bookings.created,’%d’)) AS creationDate, Count(res_hotel_booking_bookings.id) As reservationsMade FROM res_hotel_booking_bookings WHERE res_hotel_booking_bookings.created >= ‘2013-10-15 00:00:00’ AND res_hotel_booking_bookings.created <= ‘2013-10-17 24:00:00’ GROUP BY YEAR(res_hotel_booking_bookings.created), MONTH(res_hotel_booking_bookings.created), DAY(res_hotel_booking_bookings.created) ORDER BY creationDate DESC There are more concise ways to do this, but this was adapted from an earlier method that used CONCAT so I stuck with that… 🙂

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Link aggregation / NIC teaming [Windows 7]

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Some tips for link aggregation/NIC teaming in Windows 7 using Intel NICs and drivers: Intel NIC’s 802.3ad Link Aggregation in Windows 7? – [H]ard|Forumhttp://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1762818If anyone else is trying to do this, I figured it out. Follow these directions for Intel NIC’s. The feature is not included in Windows 7, so the NIC drivers have to support it. You have to be logged… Network Connectivity — How do I use Teaming with Advanced Networking Services (ANS)?http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-009747.htmAdapter teaming with Intel® Advanced Network

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NAS that supports SSDs with TRIM? [SOLVED]

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Q. I am looking for a NAS that will let me use SSDs and supports TRIM. That is very important to me because I want the SSDs to last a long time. I like Intel or Samsung drives if possible and I only need 100GB to 200GB or so. FYI I am looking for a two bay RAID1 mirrored solution. Thank you! -Sergio Kan A. Hi Sergio, I think you are in luck 🙂 Synology is a well respected NAS brand

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Why I may never (again) buy a Drobo

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Drobo = Great Idea I love the idea of Drobo. A storage device that: protects your data, is easily upgradeable, and is dead simple to use. When it comes to the reality I find things less rosy. Before I continue this review let me make note that there seems to be a conspiracy theory out there about negative Drobo reviews. I do not know if the theory is correct or not but many negative reviews seem to be met with

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CMOS battery dead, lost settings, Windows won’t boot!

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Q. Yo J.D……so my hoss of a Dell laptop (the one with a 20″ screen) seems to have bit it again…It was left unplugged for a couple of days and I think that internal battery was drained. So it will try and start windows, but then it crashes and starts the reboot process over…I can get into set up…do you know how I can fix that boot problem? -John A. Howdy John. Yes, it sounds like your CMOS battery is

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ZyXEL 35 default username and password

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The ZyXEL 35’s default LAN IP address for accessing the web based ZyWALL interface is: 192.168.1.1 and the default password is: 1234 (no username is necessary) Make sure you access it from the LAN side and not the WAN side Ethernet port 🙂 NOTE: to reset these values to default, power on the XyXEL 35 and press and hold the physical RESET button for 30 seconds. At that time you will see all four LAN ports flash ORANGE and you

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